ACLU Says Florida Minority Voters Mail Ballots Rejected More

posted by Gordon Byrd -

Sep 19, 2018

MIAMI (970 WFLA) -- A new report claims some voters are more likely to have their mail-in ballots rejected than others.

Nancy Abudu, legal director with the Florida chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, says her group reviewed the 2012 and 2016 general elections with a University of Florida professor. They say minority voters and younger mail voters were twice as likely to have their ballots turned down than whites who voted absentee.

Abudu says the report shows there's a lack of uniformity in the way different ballots are treated from county to county. "If it's about signature matching, the signatures of white voters tend to be accepted at much higher rates than those of minority voters, " Abudu said.

The ACLU study says mail ballots are more likely to be rejected than votes cast on Election Day or during early voting.

A court ruling requires election supervisors to notify voters when their ballots are rejected and tell them how to fix the problem. But the ACLU report says the legislature needs to create guidelines for notifying voters when there's a problem.

In the meantime, Abudu says voters should be proactive and check to make sure their ballots have arrived and have been counted. That means going online and looking at a county elections website.